When I excitedly showed my treasure to the shop clerk, the individual merely shrugged and pointed to a corkboard over-pinned with similar items. A bit crushed, I paid for the book and started to wonder: Even with all their buying and selling to make a living, do antiquarian booksellers ever keep found things for themselves?

Whately Antiquarian Book Center owner Barbara Smith and her business partner, Eugene Povirk, have stumbled on more than their fair share of ephemera in their store’s inventory. It turns out that the exciting is also the exception and not everything found inside the pages of books is rare.

“Bibles and cookbooks are the two places that most ephemera shows up,” said Smith, owner of kept piles of bookmarks, secret code notes written by children, clipped newspaper articles and postcards never sent.

“For the most part, I remove items from books that might mar the pages further. If dried flowers and leaves have already done their damage, and it is not a rare book, then I let them remain as a pleasant surprise for the new owner.”

Stray pieces of paper are usually discarded while old recipes in cookbooks and publisher’s collateral like business cards and advertising in review copies always stay with the book. If an item found is of genuine interest, then it is sold together with the book. Sometimes those items are more valuable than the actual books.

“The most significant ephemera I ever found was in a box bought at an estate auction several years ago. There were a lot of good books in that box, many of them circa mid-1960s including a small stack of “Southern Exposure,” an interesting liberal journal of the time,” said Judith Tingley, owner of South Deerfield’s Meetinghouse Books.

“As I was leafing through these, I noticed that a few handbills hand been tucked into the journals. They were printed on incredibly thin, delicate paper. One was an invitation to join Dr. Martin Luther King’s March to Montgomery on March 25, 1965. The other an invitation to a pre-march Freedom Rally featuring some great performers including Nina Simone, Billy Eckstine, Odetta, Dick Gregory, and many others. These were real pieces of history and it was thrilling just to hold them,” Tingley stated.

Knowing that very few of these such fragile papers could have survived, she put them up for auction and sold them to a collector of Civil Rights memorabilia who said these were the second examples he’d ever seen in all his years of collecting.

Paul Miller-Reed, co-owner of New England Book Auctions in Sunderland, has touched a Guttenberg leaf, an original Renaissance drawing hidden inside an old art book and the personal journal of a Civil War soldier. All of these things he would never had seen had he not been in his business but they’re also things he’s parted with because he knew they belonged elsewhere.

Book owners mostly leave their names on the inside cover with dates scratched in fountain pen, No. 2 pencil, or modern ball-point. Occasionally there’s “marginalia,” the official word for margin notes and scribbles, and funny inscriptions warning thieves to not steal books or they’ll be cursed. Sometimes there’s a tiny Victorian braided hair ring but the most common, oft-forgotten article is money.

“This has only happened twice to me, not counting the occasional low denomination bill used as a bookmark,” said Barbara Smith. “I had been called to a house in Northampton to go through books in this woman’s attic in preparation for her selling the house. As I was casually leafing through some large volumes, $20 bills started fluttering to the floor.”

She remembers opening several other books to find many more bills inside. She called the home owner to witness the find and her explanation was that her husband, who had lived in London as a child during the World War II German Blitz bombings, carried on the tradition of his family that hid their money in books.

Photo by Sarah PlatanitisCorbeil points out the signature of Ralph Waldo Emerson, found by chance inside a book at a pick-lot auction.

“It doesn’t happen very often but sometimes there is that serendipitous find,” said Eileen Corbeil, owner of Easthampton’s White Square Books & Art, of a hardback find inscribed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and a ledger from an unknown doctor in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

“The ledger is from 1842 from 1862. I’ve got all his patient records with all his notations. It feels a little bit invasive to be honest but the handwriting is just so beautiful.”

Ken Schoen, of Schoen Books specializes in German Judaica. He and his wife, artist Jane Trigere, have found a 19th-century letter containing information about Emily Dickinson (now safe in special collections at Amherst College) and a portfolio from the grandfather of rabbi and scholar, Daniel Gordis. “I was able to locate Daniel Gordis and send him the documents. The papers and photos revealed an aspect of his grandfather he had not as a child seen, his whimsy and warmth and affection for his grandmother. The whole extended family shared in the delight,” Schoen said.

Years ago, a book buying trip to Queens, N.Y., led him to a German Jewish refugee and a priceless volume of which Schoen will never let go.

“In 1933, the man had obtained the ‘Brown Book of the Hitler Terror,’ describing for the world the Nazi atrocities. Possessing the book was punishable by imprisonment,” Schoen said.

“When he fled Germany, he had hidden the book in an attic space in his home. He returned years after the war ended, retrieved the book and wrote the story on the endpaper. He gave it to me to remember him and his life by. It was a very powerful gift and I think of him often.”

No matter the category, when an old book with passes through your hands, take care and research it. It just may turn out to be something special or maybe just something extraordinary.